Frank Bruni, Fabulist?

In his latest piece, New York Times columnist Frank Bruni, who is liberal and gay, wrote about an anonymous former college classmate who was an observant conservative Catholic back then, but who has since changed his mind. Excerpt:

He had researched and reflected on much of this by the time he graduated from medical school, and so he decided to devote a bit of each week to helping out in an abortion clinic. Over years to come, in various settings, he continued this work, often braving protesters, sometimes wearing a bulletproof vest.

He knew George Tiller, the Kansas abortion provider shot dead in 2009 by an abortion foe.

THAT happened in a church, he noted. He hasn’t belonged to one since college. “Religion too often demands belief in physical absurdities and anachronistic traditions despite all scientific evidence and moral progress,” he said.

That sort of thing. Bruni ends with his anonymous friend, now a doctor, performing an abortion on one of the loudest pro-life protesters, who came to him on the sly because he was a familiar face. She supposedly told him that she wasn’t like those other loose women who sought abortions. A week later, we are told, she was back in front of the clinic, protesting.

It is not usually my Sunday habit (or Monday habit, or Tuesday habit…) to read Frank Bruni, but I was motivated to do so by an e-mail one of this blog’s readers sent. He said that he and someone else in his house had read that column, and concluded that Bruni was making this up. What did I think? Could that happen? Does the Times fact-check op-ed columnists? I told him I didn’t know, but I’d take a look at the column. I cautioned him that I often conceal the names and identifying information from people I write about, which causes some readers to accuse me of making these people up to serve an ideological point. I never do make anybody up, but I can’t prove that, because to give their names would defeat the whole purpose of having made them anonymous in the first place. People usually accuse me of making these anonymous figures up when they strongly object to the political, cultural, or ideological point the anonymous figure illustrates. But I really don’t make these people up; however, I can’t blame people for being skeptical when I do not attach checkable information to the quote. The point being that before reading the column, I wanted to give Frank Bruni the benefit of the doubt.

I had to agree that Bruni’s Anonymous Friend sounds completely bogus. He is just too perfect an illustration of what a gay secular liberal would want to see from the “conversion” of a conservative Catholic. He becomes a pro-gay, agnostic abortionist. Really? That happened? I suppose it could have happened, but boy, is that hard to believe. For me, the part of Bruni’s column that raised the most suspicion were his quotes attributed to Anonymous Friend. For example:

“In all centuries, through all history, women have ended pregnancies somehow,” he said. “They feel so strongly about this that they will attempt abortion even when it’s illegal, unsafe and often lethal.”

And:

“If doctors and nurses do not step up and provide these services or if so many obstacles and restrictions are put into place that women cannot access the services, then the stream of women seeking abortions tends to flow toward the illegal and dangerous methods,” he said.

I’m sorry, but nobody talks like that. Those sound like lines taken from a piece of formal op-ed writing. It could be that Anonymous Friend is inarticulate, and Bruni paraphrased his ramblings and presented them as quotations. Maybe. This is an op-ed, not a piece in the news section, so I would grant him a certain license here. But boy, it sure does sound phony. Completely phony. I’m with Mark Shea, who calls b.s.:

I sincerely hope somebody seriously tries to vet this. And I’ll lay odds that nobody properly vetted it before it ran. Why should they? Sacred religious dogmas require no evidence.

By the way, light blogging today. Overnight, some evil gremlin came into my room and decided to use my sinuses as a storage facility for wet concrete. I have been poleaxed. If you need me, I’ll be in bed, consuming enough Sudafed to supply the trailer-park meth labs of Livingston Parish for a week.

UPDATE: Even if every word of Frank Bruni’s column is true, it should not have been published, as a matter of journalistic good practice — and wouldn’t have been if it didn’t hit all the confirmation-bias sweet spots of the Times’ op-ed staff. Ask yourself: would Ross Douthat be able to get away with publishing a column based on an anonymous source claiming to have been a pro-gay, godless abortionist who had a Catholic religious conversion and came to believe that homosexuality and abortion was immoral, and dedicated himself to working against gay rights and abortion rights? Of course he couldn’t! Not in The New York Times. I agree with the Catholic viewpoint on all these issues, but if I were his editor, I wouldn’t have published it either.

Anyway, do that thought experiment: imagine that Ross Douthat, a pro-life Catholic NYT columnist, had turned in a column just like Bruni’s, except one using an anonymous source to make the opposite points. Would it have been published? The question itself is laughable. Which tells you something about the Times‘s bias re: Bruni’s absurd column.

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75 Responses to Frank Bruni, Fabulist?

I don’t think this is a frbrication outof wole cloth. But I do think it smells of major embellishment, in the old “never let the truth get in the way of a good story” tradition.The friend was probably a church-going Catholic, but not a partcularly “conservative” one, and he later left the Church (surely we’ve all known people like that?). And while he may have performed an abortion on someone ostensibly pro-Life, I doubt they were a picketer, or showed up on the protest line afterward. However it is true (cynicism alert) that most Americans oppose abortion with three exceptions: medical necessity, rape, and their own situation whatever it may be. I’ve known people like that too.

“What I find hard to believe is that a young man who used to lead Bible studies turns into a non-believing, pro-gay abortionist.”

That is rather easy for me to believe; people who have brittle principles will quite emphatically toggle to invert them – the more brittle one is, the more likely this may happen, at least from what I’ve observed over the decades. It’s one of the reasons that brittle principles are dangerous, spiritually speaking. (To clarify, what I mean by brittle principles are those that are formed almost entirely by propositions, and are not well integrated with actual human people and experiences; without that integration, all you need is for one pre-rational assumption to shift for the whole edifice to be reverse – and assumptions can’t really be argued in a logical way, so this is the Achilles heel of the situation.)

What is harder to believe is the convenience of the quotations that provide some of the weft for the column.

The whole point of Frank’s friend is to portray atheist abortionists as moral, compassionate people, and the point of the anecdote is to portray anti-abortionists and believers as hypocrites.

Yeah, as I stated above, I’m uncomfortable with using anonymous sources as witnesses to events like the pro-life activist who gets an abortion and then goes right back out to man the barricades. You really would have to be self-delusional to act in that way. Perhaps there are people out there who are that way, but in any event they say nothing whatsoever about the legitimacy of the pro-life movement as a whole.

On the other hand, while being pro-life myself, I really do understand a lot of the valid moral arguments on the other side, some of which Bruni is using his doctor to present. And that’s kind of where the other side of my unease with Bruni’s argument comes in: by using a doctor who was formerly a Catholic and who ostensibly changed his views on abortion to state the case, Bruni’s making something of an argument to authority, while keeping the identity of the authority hidden.

So yeah, there would seem to be problems with this particular piece. But I still stand by the judgment that anonymous anecdotes of this type aren’t necessarily bad; they can be used to introduce some interesting ideas and writing. Heck, authors have been disguising fiction as anonymous truthful reporting for centuries in order to advance social agendas. There’s no reason to really exclude the technique from op-ed writing.

Would Ross Douthat be able to get away with publishing a column based on an anonymous source claiming to have been a pro-gay, godless abortionist who had a Catholic religious conversion and came to believe that homosexuality and abortion was immoral, and dedicated himself to working against gay rights and abortion rights?

Well, on the question of homosexuality, the cultural consensus has pretty much been moving in one particular direction for a while now. I’m sure there are people out there who have started out thinking being gay is just peachy but have come to believe that it’s a terrible moral failing. It’s just that those people seem to be pretty few and far between.

So basically, I’d be more likely to believe Bruni’s anonymous observer over Douthat’s, simply because I have heard of people shifting in favor of gay rights a fair bit, but have heard little or nothing about people going the other way. Maybe that’s because they don’t get reported on, but my guess is that neither you or Douthat actually knows anyone like that. Bruni’s doctor is at least semi-plausible.

So basically, I’d be more likely to believe Bruni’s anonymous observer over Douthat’s, simply because I have heard of people shifting in favor of gay rights a fair bit, but have heard little or nothing about people going the other way

You get this every so often. Back in the early 00s, you got a lot of, “I used to be liberal, but since 9/11, I’ve become outraged about Chappaquidick, think that global climate change is a hoax, and feel we need to defend marriage against the gays.”

I’m not sure why you don’t believe the physician had paradigm switch. I certainly did.The only difference between me and the man in the story is that I don’t perform abortions but I defend the right of women to have them.

Dave, who exactly would “those people” be? Thousands of Americans joined the Communist Party, not because they saw it as “a great moral evil” and wanted to be the baddest bad guys on the block, but because their own life experience, observations, perhaps reading, convinced them that it was the way forward for a better life for the largest number of human beings. A much larger number, who either weren’t interested enough to become deeply involved, or didn’t think they wanted to work such long hours or so single-mindedly, admired what the communists they knew were able to accomplish for the wretched of the earth.

Clearly, the more positive accomplishments of people who embraced communism were delivered in the context of American economic disaster and inequality, by people who never came close to exercising the power of a state. They tarnished themselves, in part, by taking their inspiration from communist parties in power in other lands, who were delivering something markedly different than what they projected abroad as their desired image.

But they believed in what they were doing. Some went to their grave still believing. Some had wrenching changes in loyalty. Some drifted away with a good sense of humor about the whole thing… e.g. Jessica Mitford, who wrote A Fine Old Conflict about the experience. Rod Dreher has written about flirting with left-wing politics — much wimpier than a real communist party, but left-wing, and why he turned to more conservative principles.

In the eyes of a committed pro-life advocate, the pro-choice position is responsible for 50 million homicides. I don’t agree, but if you want to talk about grave moral evil — the chasm is no less than over communism. The point with Whittaker Chambers is, one really can change their principles 180 degrees. I’ve changed a good deal of how I look at the world over 40 years or so, but I try hard NOT to change 180 degrees. I sort out what motivated me in the first place, what is really eternal verity, what is trial and error, what is hopeful premise that didn’t prove true, etc. But people do act erratically, or inconsistently, do a complete turnaround.

“What I find hard to believe is that a young man who used to lead Bible studies turns into a non-believing, pro-gay abortionist.”

Oh come on, Rod. You were once a college leftist. It is entirely plausible that this doctor had such a conversion. Interaction with the real world tends to change people, just as it changed you and Bernard Nathanson.

BTW, as a pro-choice, gay person I found Bruni’s article just a bit too perfect myself. But I have seen arch-conservatives turn into liberals and vice versa.

You mention 50 million homicides. My point is that a pro-lifer would have to believe being pro-choice is such a radical good that it would cause him to jettison that mindset to the point of being complicit in causing them.

I just don’t see this. I believe people can radically change, but they need a radical good to replace the old one. I don’t see any pro-choice argument as providing that for the level of this specific guy. Not enough to convince him to do abortions. Maybe enough to convince him to vote pro-choice. Or maybe volunteer. Being directly complicit is a whole other story.

If I was raised a pacifist, and change to the point where I kill a man, it’s not because I believe that theorectically some people have to kill others, but it should be as rare as possible. It’s not that abstract. I have to kill this guy because a great evil will happen right now if I don’t. Maybe he will blow up a bus or something. If I believed the former I’d do something like support the war effort, or start paying taxes despite them being used for military means.

To be complicit in that radical of a change I’d need a very good and moral reason. Unless I was a really weak pacifist to begin with. If you like dogs, its going to be hard as hell to kick one no matter how much you change.

Fanciful or no, Bruni’s article is a brilliant piece of propaganda. He successfully (and subtly, to someone who’s not looking for it) labels Christians homophobic, misogynist pigs, no better than those who practice female circumcision.

I like how the good doctor managed to lead a sheltered Catholic childhood in the South 30-40 years ago, where Catholics were often vilified loudly by their Protestant counterparts. Of course, everyone knows that Catholics hate women and homosexuals, right? And of course, to the majority of NYT readers, folks from the South are hateful, racist ignoramuses. It’s the ideal backdrop for a spectacular “conversion”. Our post-modern MD makes the perfect progressive Christ figure, except that instead of allowing himself to be sacrificed on the cross for our sins, he sacrifices his outmoded ideology on the cross of “reason” to atone for his own sins of ignorance.

Bruni generously castigates himself for having committed the only sin that has any meaning for our society: intolerance. His self-serving “humility” is a little hard to swallow, however, as it is obvious that if his college acquaintance had turned out to be what he thought he was all along, he would have felt entirely justified in his lack of patience for such an unenlightened, spiteful, “gym rat”.

I am a former Catholic who is now an atheist, and I am strongly pro-choice. And in the unlikely event that I happened to write a confessional letter to a newspaper columnist my writing might indeed come across as “formal op-ed writing.” So I don’t think you can discount the possibility that Bruni’s friend is real.

Nevertheless, I have to say I while I was reading that column — especially the part about the hypocritical abortion protester — what I was thinking was “Really?”. I wouldn’t have thought about it again, but it’s interesting to see that other people had the same response.

When I read the column I couldn’t help compare it to my own experience: growing up in a very liberal, pro-abortion, house, I ended up a conservative pro-life Catholic by the time I entered medical school. I’ve done work for pro-life groups and have marched at events. I very strongly considered entering the Sisters of Life at one point.
So this sort of about face can happen, although I agree that Bruni’s account is all too convenient. I also wouldn’t call his roommate a conservative Catholic- probably any Catholic who went to mass was likely to be called conservative by Bruni, but the milieu this guy came out of- Southern Catholicism in the 1980′s, was very loosey-goosey.

With all due respect Dave, it seems that your point reduces to “I, as a sincerely pro life individual, abhor abortion so much that, while I can imagine someone who shares my pro life convictions weakening to the point that they vote pro-choice, I am convinced that anyone who ever shared my beliefs could never actually bring themselves to perform an abortion.”

From your perspective, no doubt that makes sense. But we are talking about people who no longer share your perspective. To even vote pro-choice, one would almost have to come to the conclusion, no, these abortions are not intentional homicides. As a pro-choice independent voter, I can clearly see that IF what is removed from the womb IS a human being, IF these are murders, then the compromise of “live and let live” would be as unacceptable as “she’s his wife, what business of mine is it if he kills her?”

I can be pro choice only so long as I see a distinct difference between a fetus and a person. That is why I support the provision in the Roe v. Wade decision which allows states to prohibit abortion during the third trimester, unless the mother’s life is in danger. By that time, I can’t see much difference, by the last few weeks, I can’t see any difference. It is always best to err on the safe side.

By Mary Russell’s description, it is certainly possible to drastically change one’s point of view, even if she does display the convert’s disdain for the zeal of those who were in the faith when she was a pro-abortion liberal, whom she glibly describes as “loosey-goosey” with a certain dose of regional bigotry tossed in.

Siarlys (pls excuse me taking for tangential discourse, triagulation back to the Douthat’ish query will follow) in your defense of a certain anthropological justice contra tyranny of the hive re:
___ “existing cells divide to keep up the total number”
can you please clarify which properties of “cells” and what form of “existence” make them similar enough to tally collectively to arrive a “total” number? Your logic appears to reverses itself 180° in the very same thread, from pro-tyranny of bodies against constituent cells (and dependent cells of distinct constituent bodies hosted within organs therein) to contra-tyranny of political bodies against their consituent individuals (and dependent individuals hosted within organic institutions therein)

In the face of documented existential violence — cliterectomy and infibulation — against the individual, the opinion maker appeals to his audience’s credulity on his subjects ‘altruism’ — and would thus appear to contravene your model for human dignity/liberty of “mere cells/total number” and his indignation at hypocrisy appears to contradict also your scheme of corporate legitimacy/freedom? to paraphrase Orwell, are some cells more equal than others? Those of external orifices may not be excised or mutilated, but those same form of cells contained in the external orifices of another body gestating inside the orifice’s extension may be excised or mulitated? People may be hypocrites in their interior private lives yet they may not be so impolite publically? What norm determines why not?

Consider Comte on altruism: le bien, le droit d’autrui (“the good, the right of the other”)

* Who is “the other” what number of rights does he have?
* How near or far do his rights extend in magnitude?
* When does this magnitude of rights begin to exist?
* What good of mine (magnitude of my rights) outranks his magnitude of rights (his existential good)?

Can you see how your 180° version is inherently incoherent? The only coherent version would be one that is full circle identical for all individual wherever their locus in time and space in a 360° rotation (ie that the vantage point of the opinion maker is irrelevant, only then is the tyranny of relativism overcome.

And thus, albeit in roundabout fashion, I have answered Rod’s opening query on a Douthat opinion piece that were to make the same errors in logic (contd.).

Should Douthat ever be so sloppy, the NYT would certainly recognize the pole star for navigating truth and reporting on it accurately, right? Well I grant that’s conditional on assuming that the NYT assumes that we all assume there is a pole star (something they have shown scant evidence of in recent times) and that they — and we — will hold ourselves accountable to it. “It” also being conditional, dependent on how you define it. Is the pole star the same number and magnitude form of thing — celestial body — for all the ages? Is truth the same cosmic verity for all ages? Are number and magnitude distinct or can the one be sacrificed to promote the other? Can we share the universe with a variety of pole stars? Probably not. Our ‘body’ of global aviation would disintegrate as the ‘cells’ of commercial air traffic began colliding with each other.

So what prevents disintegration? What integrates so many disparate cultures, languages and political economies exchanging currencies doing little harm to the passenger-participants? A unity, a comprehensive agreement on one pole star for navigation (reality’s truth is what it is, que sera sera). Why do we trust and have an abiding expectation in the 360° truth of passenger flight but are not willing to extend the same to passenger float (a zygote ensconced in her 360° perspective of her mommy’s uterus)?

Well could it be that we (and mommy) permit ourselves a blindspot, a 180° perspective on floating we would never condone for air haulage? An airline may not be granted liberty to decide when passengers are merely cells and when they are bodies. They are awarded a public license to fly commercially upon surrendering that freedom, by submitting to internationally accepted conduct for departing pilots and receiving airport air traffic controllers. Why not the same internationally accepted conduct for womb passengers?

Well, funny that. Actually there is. It’s called marriage: the pilot, the bridegroom; the air-traffic controller, the bride. She decides who lands in her backyard. The pilot may have an ejaculator seat for in-flight accidents but he doesn’t use it on every trip right? Such disruptive interceptions would be patently unacceptable to passengers of airplanes who value their life and liberty and continued pursuit of happiness! Yet contraception has done something similar to our sexual sojourning. Unseen excised and mutilated corpses litter the landscape in the name of reproductive justice, an anthropology of 180° relativism, an altruism where “the other” is no longer anyone’s concern. Where the pilot unions and airtraffic controller unions mandate the terms of flight and the passengers have no say, even under a so-called conservative government in the UK, see this quote from Archbishop Nichols on a recent BBC Nightline news program:

“.. massive flaw in the Consultation, one which exposes the poverty of the Government’s thinking about marriage, is the complete absence from it of children. As the Archbishop of Westminster pointed out in last night’s Newsnight (beginning at 11’40):

___’To me it is utterly astonishing that in the whole consultation document … there is not one reference to a child. There is no reference to children at all. And I think that shows that the vision of marriage contained in the consultation document is reduced. It is excluding things that are of the very nature of marriage.’…”

Siarlys, my claim about Catholicism in the South from that time period was made from my experience of living in that time, in that region. Yours? I have no idea whether Bruni’s roommate was liberal or conservative, just casting more doubt on Bruni’s narrative and assumptions given the regional context

my malapropism (for ‘ejector seat’) is not intented to offend but to elicit the humor needed to see how risible the antagonism of relativism really is, something Sheridan’s original Mrs Malaprop of The Rivals acquits herself of much better than I:
on the baby lost to abortion:“…promise to forget this fellow – to illiterate him, I say, quite from your memory.” (i.e. obliterate; Act I Scene II Line 178)
on Siarlys indignation of same:“…she might reprehend the true meaning of what she is saying.” (i.e. comprehend; Act I Scene II Line 258)
on Bruni’s hearsay hero’s hearsay heroine:“…she’s as headstrong as an allegory on the banks of Nile.” (i.e. alligator; Act III Scene III Line 195)
on Rod’s disdain for my verbosity (chuckle):“Sure, if I reprehend any thing in this world it is the use of my oracular tongue, and a nice derangement of epitaphs!” (i.e. comprehend, vernacular, arrangement, epithets)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malapropism#Mrs._Malaprop

“Mahatma Gandhi’s views on human sexuality aren’t what you would expect from a hero of the Left | He said, “Birth control, as practiced in the West, has led to the degradation of marriage and unbridled sensual enjoyment. Men, supposed to be good thinkers in Europe, call marriage a superstition.” Among the European intelligentsia, the argument that marriage was bad and unnatural for man—and ought to be done away with—was becoming increasingly popular. In response, Gandhi declared: “Such ideas based on so-called ethics and science fill me with horror.”

Siarlys I understand that. But you keep dismissing the degree that being an abortionist actually transgresses core principles. You don’t change that radically like switching on a light bulb-it’s a long process of regret and exploration, and it’s certainly not something someone fresh from college does. While Chambers probably had a eureka moment, the groundwork was set with many small incidents, over time.

and even then he wont resort to lolleftist cliches when asked about it. He’ll frame it in personal terms with real issues and answers. Someone who hasn’t seen the other side at all will say like Bruni’s friend does-those that have will almost always temper their remarks and realize the issue is a lot more complex than that.

You can see where I’m skeptical. It doesn’t feel right in terms of change, just in general.

Clare, you are UTTERLY incoherent, but I will try to answer the one question I can dimly perceive lurking in your LSD-laced rhetoric. (Note: I’m not saying you use LSD, just commenting on the way you use words and the absence of clear communication resulting from it).

I was pointing out that individuals cells of the human body, although alive, are of no particular moral significance. It is the whole that is greater than the sum of the parts that has moral significance. I also said that it is a mistake to apply that model eidetically to a human community. An individual human being is NOT an irrelevant cell, nor the community as a whole the only entity of moral significance.

I might have added, however, that every time someone sacrifices their own life for a larger community, family, friend, spouse, children, parents, etc., that person is indeed CHOOSING to say that whoever or whatever they lay down their life for is more important than their own life. It can get complicated.

No form of circumcision, male or female, good, bad, ugly, or indifferent, is of any relevance to that comparison.

By the way, whatever made you think that Gandhi was a “leftist”? When is the last time you heard of a leftist remaining faithfully with his wife after taking a solemn vow of chastity? (Among many other distinctions one could think of).

Mary… I suppose to be credible you would have to give some detail about what constitutes “loosey-goosey,” what would qualify in your opinion as not loosey-goosey, the dates of your change of heart, and then I would wait for a few faithful Roman Catholics who lived in the south in the 1980s to give you a piece of their mind… and then I would start to think about it. You still sound like you have the zeal of a convert, sort of like the three-pack-a-day smoker who quit and annoys even those who never smoked in their life.

Dave, what can I say? The mental, emotional and moral distance looks too great from where you sit, to imagine anyone travelling it, particularly in that direction. But some do.

Hey, I have an idea… Mr. Dreher, you know this writer, correct? Why don’t you ask him if his friend is real, and if there is anything he can tell us, without violating confidentiality, that would reassure us on that point? Here we are all speculating about whether it is LIKELY? Let’s ask whether it is TRUE?

This story of Bruni’s is disturbing. This abortion is meant to be celebrated as a sign of enlightenment. But even if you are ardently pro choice, how could this story not make you ill? The woman (made up or not) needs an abortion because she doesn’t have the money to raise a child. Bruni, as a liberal, should be appalled at this. What it says is only well off should ever have children. If you’re a liberal, shouldn’t this story be upsetting?
Has anyone ever seen this woman on the ladder?